The Bad: Remember that new Toshiba A665 laptop I got in mid-December. It’s in the shop :-(. It looks like there is a hardware problem in the quicklaunch bar touch buttons (that’s the one with the lit buttons that controls speaker volume and such). The beeping problem returned today without the iPod issue, and I brought it in. Hopefully, it will be back within two weeks.
The Ugly. Best Buy’s exchange policy is only 14 days. Thus, it has to go into service; I can’t just exchange it on the spot. I do think 14 days is a ridiculous return policy for computer equipment, but they were probably driven to it by the folks that abuse returns.
The Good. I went in to Geek Squad mid-week in the evening. No lines, and lots of time to talk to the supervisor. I also did a full backup, including an image backup, to a USB drive before I brought it over, so I should be able to restore it if it comes back with a different machine. This is only an issue if they can’t repair it and do an exchange instead. Then the risk is that Best Buy will have no more A665s in stock, for you can’t do an image restore to a different machine.
The other goodness is that the lack of a crowd permitted me the time to make another copy of the data in a form I could read from my old machine. As I have the same software on the old machine, and hadn’t yet decomissioned the old Windows XP machine, I’m back up and running with both Quicken and iTunes, which are the critical software programs I need.
This, by the way, is why I have emphasizing so much the issue of having a good backup. I’ve got a backup to restore from if I need it, and I’ve got my critical data so I can keep working while my machine is in the shop. This also confirms the direction I’ve been thinking about: to retain the old machine as a file server and printer server, as well as an emergency backup. It does cement the fact that I want a secondary backup program that can run on both Windows XP and Windows 7 (64 bit). Again, recommendations are welcome.
